Visual presentation

Visual presentation

Foodies focus on flavour. Real estate agents zone in on location. To Danny Ingrouville, it’s all about presentation.

The next artist-in-residence at Cambridge Centre for the Arts has spent the better part of the last three decades creating storefront displays, and in the year ahead he hopes to disseminate his expertise in the Cambridge community and watch local businesses reap the rewards.

“I think what I’m going to do is try to inspire other people to be the artist,” Ingrouville said. “I’m going to show them a lot of what I have done and what inspired me to create these things, show them raw materials that they can build things from, and then I plan on hopefully getting the community retailers to ask me into their stores for ideas and suggestions and to brainstorm with them about what would make their products sell better, using colour, texture, line – all the principles and elements of design to help enhance their products, storefronts and layout. The good thing is by the end of this we might even have a gauge, by looking at revenue, whether or not a better look really is making a better statement and selling more product.”

Ingrouville, now 54, studied ballet jazz in Montreal and later opened his own dance school in Cambridge, which he admits turned out to be more of a hobby than a steady business. But it was while working with Club Med as an aerobics instructor in the early 1980s that he began working on stage and set design, and was eventually recruited by a world famous department store to create soft sculptures.

“From the set designs I made a few props that members of Harrods of London, England really liked and they asked if I could work on some of them for their store in London,” he recalled. “So I created all these Santa Clauses for them. I just sort of lucked into it. I do have somewhat of a natural talent for balancing colour and appreciation for other things, so I was lucky to have a chance to work with that stuff. And back in those days, it wasn’t all about having the paperwork to get you in the front door.”

After returning to Canada, Ingrouville was in charge of storefront windows for The Bay at Yonge and Bloor, and then took a job with Roots Canada as the head of visual presentation. For the past 25 years he’s operated his own display service called Bushel and Peck, working with clients such as Ralph Lauren, Marks and Spencer, Ostranders Jewellers and the Royal Ontario Museum. Locally, people might be familiar with his work at Women’s International Gift and Gallery, Conestoga Furniture, Cornerstone Home Interiors and Budds department stores in Simcoe, Guelph and Kitchener. Ingrouville also teaches in the visual merchandising program at Conestoga College.

He will be presenting a series of lectures and workshops as part of a program Destination Cambridge: Art and Retail – Where Creativity Meets Commerce.

“What does the product say to you?” he asks rhetorically. “What is it saying that it wants to be surrounded by?”

Ingrouville believes that Cambridge has the ability to create more “eclectic retail districts” given the historic architecture and uniqueness of all three core areas.

“I think the opportunity lies in the retail community that if they work together, we’ll become such a grand community.”

He compares Cambridge to Dundas and St. Jacob’s, where shopping is a tourist attraction.

“You go there. You plan on where you’re going to lunch and that you’re going to hit this shop and that one,” he said. “There is no reason why we in Cambridge shouldn’t be exactly like that. We’ve got the theatre, we’ve got Cambridge Mill, we’ve got the architecture university, we’ve got these incredible art galleries and shops and they’re all starting to amalgamate and are making it happen already. I’m just bringing this to the public’s attention, that’s all.”